Fifteen Zeros
by In-betweens
Summary: Every man woman and child is born with fifteen numbers etched into the soft skin of their left wrists above the veins that lead directly to the heart. Two percent of the population are born with fifteen zeros. This is the story of one such person. (Soulmate themed SuperCat.) Day 5 of SuperCatWeek2: Soulmate AU


**Title:** Fifteen Zeros  
 **Author** : InBetweens  
 **Rating:** PG  
 **Plot** : Every man woman and child is born with fifteen numbers etched into the soft skin of their left wrists above the veins that lead directly to the heart. Two percent of the population are born with fifteen zeros. This is the story of one such person. (Soulmate themed SuperCat.)  
 **Disclaimer** : I do not own any of the Supergirl characters.

 **Part 1 of 1**

No one knows how it happened or why. There were theories and speculations, hypothesis and failed experiments. False writings of 'proof'(?) debunked by years of accurate study. The truth of the matter was that no one really knew the answer. No one knew why or how. The mystery behind it was the way it was meant to be. No one needed to question the how's or whys. People just needed to focus on the when's and who's.

For the last five hundred years every man, woman, and child was born with an inscription. A tattoo. And for most it was active. Not to say it was interactive, it wasn't. Per say. But it was dynamic.

The light gray or deep black tattoo changed. The fifteen numerals moved, down. A countdown. It took people three generations to realize just what these mysterious numbers were counting down to. Three generations, almost a hundred and fifty years. When it was discovered what these numbers represented, what it truly meant, there was an uprising of sorts. A shift in power and the way society was ruled, how religions were taught and with all things, there were dissenters. There were those that did not believe in the numbers, in what they stood for. There were those who did not and could not accept the universality of what these fifteen numerals represented. The future they promised.

So they rebelled.

It took society nearly another hundred years to find it's natural pace once again. The sharp jagged edges left in the wake of the rebellions were finally smoothed over. Society was far from the Utopia many longed for, but it was growing ever better, growing more accepting, and on the cusps of something great.

Fifteen numbers. Counting down, each person's clock reading a different number, a different sum. And yet, it was always there. The inscription of destiny etched into the soft skin above a person's left wrist. The veins that flowed beneath the engraved numerals were paths to a person's heart.

From the moment a child was born there were these numbers. Countdowns.

Years: Months: Weeks: Days: Hours: Minutes: Seconds

It took the world a 150 years, 7 months, 13 weeks, 4 days, 25 minutes and 57 seconds to figure out that these numbers counted down to the moment a person would meet their 'Other'. Many referred to the 'Other' as a true love, a soulmate, a bond mate. Whatever one wanted to call it, the time counted down to the moment when two people who were meant to walk the earth together met. Some found they wished to spend their lives as friends, Others as lovers, some even as enemies. It was up to the individual to decide what they wanted from their 'Other'. Though a large percentage of the population often ended up choosing as lovers, spouses, partners.

As society grew and became more advanced so too did the countdowns upon people's wrists. No longer was it just numbers. Soon, with the population growing and chances of finding true loves becoming slimmer and slimmer in the vast sea of people and populated areas, were clues soon found to be inscribed. But only as the clocks upon a person's wrists wound down to the final stretch.

Beneath that ticking clock upon their wrists when the timer has 23hrs 59minutes left, the name of a country appears. At 11hrs and 59minutes, a city name appears, at 4hrs59mintues an address or longitude/latitude coordinates appear. When there is 3minutes and 59seconds a name appears. Then, it is gone forever and so is the timer upon the wrist.

If a person misses their 'Other' for many generations, it was almost impossible to find them again. No further clues were ever found upon the left wrist, and the clock upon their wrist would fade till it was nothing more than a memory. Now, with technology, it has become easier to find a person's 'Other' if they miss them.

An oddity that arose in the last two hundred years was the secondary 'Other'. For people who find or miss their 'Others' the clock upon their wrists do not fade away like 90% of the population. The clock resets, or reappears after a time. As if destiny is telling those select 10% that there is someone else, another 'Other' out there for them.

Effectively two soulmates.

Then there are the LS's. The Lonely Souls. One hundred and sixty million people who are born without an Other to walk through life with.

There was a great cultural shaming of a person who does not have an Other. Some think that the person's soul was so dark none could ever be bound to it. Other's think it was because the soulmate hadn't been born yet and they will meet in the next lifetime. There was no way to truly know what it meant. Just as no one knows why the numbers began, no one knows why some have two Others, or why some have none.

The Zero Hour Party was a political party made of those who were born with fifteen zeros upon their wrists. Their clocks never started and would never disappear. The round empty, unmoving, clocks a constant reminder that their souls had no perfect match.

People born without an Other often become shells of what they could be. There are those who indulge in the dark place society cast them, be it turning to lives of crime or simply adopting a pessimistic outlook. While many of those not content with their lot choose to be activists or seek answers in religion becoming priests and nuns. They can become anything they wish or don't wish. Some thrive without the attachments of Others while some fall into such a strong depression they make nothing of themselves and their lives.

Catlyn Katherine Grant becomes something. Even as her wrist is stained by fifteen zeros. She does not fall under the heavy darkness of depression. She carries it upon her shoulders until her muscles are strong and she can throw it off completely. Cat doesn't let her lack of a soulmate stop her from achieving her dreams and her goals. Rather she lets it inspire her. She meets more people who do not have soulmates. She marries two of them, has children with them—two boys who each have a countdown upon their wrists when they are born.

Seeing the years, months, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds upon their wrists fills her with hope for them. Hope that there is true joy and happiness waiting for them in their futures.

Cat is not a cynic. She does believe in soulmates. She's seen the happiness those who have their true love can have. She's seen the pricelessness of the love shared between those bonded by the times on their wrists.

Wrists that often carry tattoos, many have the names of their Other written in the area of their wrists where the fifteen numerals once counted down. Some leave the area blank; some cover it with jewelry.

Cat covered her grey zeros with a charm bracelet Adam gave her for the last Mother's Day they spent together. Cat often toys with the idea of having Adam and Carter's names inscribed over the ever present reminder that she was meant to walk this earth alone.

Cat was tired of people asking about her 'Other'. She did not need a soulmate. Not when she had her sons. Or so she tried valiantly to convince herself. Sometimes it seemed unfair that there were people in the world with two soulmates and she along with 159,999,999 people had none. But, Cat had decided long ago that the ways of the world were not for her to preside over. She had enough to rule over as the Queen of All Media. She wasn't a hopeless romantic anymore. She was a grown woman who'd spent the last forty years of her life cultivating a global media empire. She did that without an Other. She did not need an Other to reach her full potential.

So it comes as a great shock to her, a woman who had built an empire from the ground up with not much more than her own staunch determination, when her wrist burns on a Monday afternoon. She is just leaving her den, at home, when it strikes. Sudden and fast and with a fury unlike anything she's ever felt before. She's standing outside Carter's nursery, a bowl of cheerios and bubblegum antibiotics on a small platter. The burning causes her fingers to slacken, the bowl of milk and soggy cheerios in her hand falling and shattering upon the tiled floor. The white film of milk spreading across the ground and seeping under the door into Carter's room as she scrambled to remove the thick charm bracelet she hasn't taken off in almost ten years.

Carter, only fifteen months old, hears the noise and begins to cry from his crib. He was already testy, a fever and an ear infection making him very sensitive to noise. Cat is torn between going into his room and comforting him—leaving the mess for now—and between running to the kitchen to run her wrist under cold water. Finding the clasp is nearly impossible but once she does, she stares at. Surely something must have happened for the metal of the bracelet to begin to burn her skin. But she can't fathom what that cause is, staring at the bracelet pinched between her fingers as if it is the culprit.

It isn't until she looks back at her wrist, about to run her fingers over the burned area, that she notices the numbers upon her wrist. The way they are glowing a bright red and are the cause of her sudden pain. Not her bracelet. The numbers upon her wrist. The shade is such a deep red that it almost glows as if it is made of fire. The glow brightening for a moment before it slowly began to fade, until the numbers were grey once again.

Except…

Cat feels her heart stutter within her chest as if the organ just learned how to beat properly. It is unusual and painful and yet…there is a warmth spreading throughout her whole body that emanates from her chest. She worries that if she looks down her chest will be glowing that strange red glow her wrist had moment ago. But she doesn't look at her chest to see. She can't. She's too shocked to look away.

Cat grasps tightly onto her hand, the fingers of her right hand squeezing tightly around her left wrist…just beneath the slowly shifting numerals that no longer read:

 _ **000:00:00:00:00:00:00**_

But read:

 _ **011:10:05:22:19:54:54**_

11 years. Ten months. Five weeks. Twenty Two days. Nineteen hours. Fifty Four minutes and fifty four, fifty three, fifty two, fifty one, fifty seconds.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

When Kara Zor-El lands on Earth it takes several weeks for her to acclimate to her new planet. The noises, the smells, the tastes, everything is very overwhelming to her. Nothing is the same as it was. Not even the languages. Thankfully her pod was set to teach her about the planet and its diverse cultures. She knew English—in a sense—and she knew Earth's many histories. But learning these things from the Education Modules, was very different from learning about it, and living it, in real life. Learning to speak English aloud is hard. She is able to understand what people are saying to her, what it means, but the functionality of actually speaking the English words she knows she should say is hard.

The Danvers are very helpful. They help her read story books and fairy tales. They sit with her at the breakfast table and help her read news stories written by Cat Grant and Lois Lane and point her towards the comic sections and away from the troubles that plague this world. They help her annunciate her words properly and understand that some words are spelt the same way but have different tenses.

It takes time. Time that Kara feels like she shouldn't have. Stolen time. Time that her parents gifted her and Kal-El with but not everyone. It is especially hard to realize that she was so far behind Kal-El that he is now a grown man, raised on Earth by a human couple in Kansas. Kara feels like her destiny has been stolen from her. Martha and Johnathan Kent should not have raised Kal-El. Kara should have been there. She should have been the one to teach him about Krypton. She should have kept him safe and fought with him against General Zod and the Kryptonian's that survived and found Earth almost ten years ago. Ten years ago.

Time is a strange thing on Earth. It is different. It moves slower, is quantified in ways that Kara has trouble understanding. Everything about Earth is strange to her.

It is twenty-nine days after she arrived on Earth that Kara learns about another human tradition and curiosity.

It is during dinner and they are all sitting around the small table in the dining room when Alex drops her glass of water. Kara reaches forward and grabs the glass when it is several hundredths of a centimeter from the table, ensuring that it does not shatter. She also holds it lightly enough that it doesn't crumble in her grasp. She places it slowly on the table and watches, horrified, as Alex pushes her chair backwards and holds onto her left wrist tightly. Her eyes leaking with tears as she groans in pain and backs herself up into the corner of the room.

Eliza and Jerimiah stand and rush to Alex's aid, trying to ascertain what's wrong, what's causing Alex so much pain. Eliza is kneeling in front of Alex when she asks Kara to get cold water and a towel from the kitchen. Kara is gone and back within seconds, running as fast as she can.

She is scared. Scared and unsure and worried. Worried about Alex who she has never seen cry or seen in pain. Physical pain that Kara no longer understands as her skin is impenetrable.

It is hours later, that Jerimiah brought her outside into the vestibule and explained to her what happened. He spoke of human history and a natural mystery that faced them for the last five hundred years. He shows Kara his left wrist, where he has a tattoo of a date, time, place, and Eliza's maiden name written. He explains the concept of the 'Other' to her and its history. He explains that until tonight, Alex's wrist had fifteen zeros. Fifteen zeros that Kara had noticed before—under a black thick bracelet that Alex always wore—until she took it off to shower. Jerimiah couldn't explain to Kara why the numbers had been at zero for Alex for the last fifteen years of her life but were suddenly active—like they should have been. He said he would have to investigate it.

They sat in silence for a while. Then Kara started talking to him. She told him about Krypton and how on Krypton their society had evolved past the ideas of soulmates, but there had been a time in their history where they had forms of an 'Other'. They had been called bondmates. It wasn't a countdown on their wrists like humans but a secondary heart. Almost as small as a—she had to think hard for an Earth worthy description—and came up with the size of a softball, like the ones in Alex's sports bag.

Kara explains to Jerimiah that the secondary heart had become taboo, was frowned upon. They used the Codex to create perfect beings and the useless secondary heart was a fault, made a person imperfect. On Krypton only a half of one percent of the population still were born with these secondary hearts. The secondary organ was useless, it did not even 'beat' properly. It was almost like what humans would consider a begin tumor. It was attached to the primary heart, but did very little to help sustain a Kryptonian's life. The secondary heart did thump though, but it was described as an 'echo'. The secondary heart echoed the primary beat of the Kryptonian's bondmate. The secondary heart and primary heart would only beat together, in tandem, when they met their bondmate. Each organ would stop—causing a pain to course through the Kryptonian's, usually described as the pain they had to endure without their bondmate encased in one final moment, before both their hearts began to beat in unity—and the cardio rhythms of the two bondmates would forever be the same—bound together for the entireties of their lives.

Kara told Jeremiah that she had this secondary heart, this defect.

She confided in him that her mother had once thought to remove the secondary heart, but the removal had a low survival rate for the patient—and for the soulmate connected to the heart. She told him, through silent tears as she stared out at the ocean in front of them, that her Aunt Astra had to fight with her mother to stop her from having it removed, and to stop her mother from promising her hand in marriage to someone that wasn't her bondmate. That fight between her Aunt Astra and her mother had stopped the two women from speaking for a long time, but it had also ensured Kara would not have to marry someone that was not her bondmate—and her mother would stop researching the removal.

Jerimiah apologized to Kara, saddened to realize his adopted daughter was without a soulmate, just as he'd feared for Alex. He embraced her and held onto Kara as she cried. Both sure that Kara's bondmate had been lost on Krypton.

So even as they rejoiced that Alex would now be able to find her Other, they mourned the loss and knowledge that Kara would not be able to find _her_ bondmate.

It would be ten years later that their theory that Kara's bondmate had died on Krypton would be proven false. It would be while Kara sat swinging her legs back and forth on an examination table at National City University, as Alex poked and prodded her to help her finish her that Kara heard the cardio rhythmic echo of her secondary heart for the first time. Her eyes alight with happiness and wonder as she explained to Alex the significance of her secondary heart and the fact that it was still echoing a heartbeat—unbeknown to them—only several miles away.

Kara's bondmate is alive, and they are on Earth.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Cat Grant is beside herself. Her skin is alive with so much nervous energy that she may just scratch her skin raw. The numbers on her wrist have been counting down for the last 11 years. 10 months. Five weeks. Twenty-One days. 0 hours. 59 minutes. Five, four, three, two, one, zero seconds.

Cat held her breath, watching the ticking numbers. She bit heavily into her bottom lip as that burning sensation spread from her wrist up her arms, over her shoulder, and right to her heart, as if the heat was traveling from her wrist directly to her heart. She didn't look at her chest, just focused on the space beneath the numbers as the name of a country appeared. United States of America formed against her wrist in perfect script.

The name of the country stayed upon her skin for nearly four hours before it disappeared, fading away as if it had never been there.

Cat didn't sleep a wink. She spent the night sitting in her office drinking fifty-year-old bourbon. Glass after glass slid down her throat and not a single ounce of it made her stronger, made her less frightened.

Cat spent the better part of the last eleven years wondering how this could happen. She had only found one other instance of someone categorized as an L.S. suddenly generate a moving count down. It had been online and it happened the same way. It was as if the numbers burned themselves into being.

Just as the country had burned itself into Cat's skin.

Cat Grant prided herself on overcoming her own fears. She overcame so much in her life; her own fears were just some of them.

But this…the notion that there was someone out there for her scared her. Scared her more than anything had in her whole life. When you were born an LS you either let yourself be held down by your lack of an Other, or you made something of yourself. Cat made something of herself, to prove to herself that she didn't need anyone else, she didn't need an Other. It had been years since she had cried herself to sleep with the inherited knowledge that no one on this earth would love her for who she was. No one was her perfect match.

As a young woman she'd almost been consumed by the darkness that lay down those shadowed thoughts. It was with gritted teeth and determination that she pushed them aside and found happiness in her life. She helped create happiness for the populace that needed it more than she did. She made her Carter happy, she was the best mother she could be, supportive and understanding, encouraging; so unlike her own.

It was scary to admit that she had always hoped…dreamed…that she would find an Other for her. Someone that was made to walk beside her, not behind or in front of, but beside her. Someone to hold her hand as they paved their way through this world and left their mark. It was a dream she was too scared to dream, knowing where it could lead.

But now, even knowing that there was someone—or something—awaiting her in less than 24 hours, caused her to quake.

She had an Other and she wasn't sure her heart could take it. So she promised herself no matter what, she wouldn't let this change her. She would not go running around the United States after this 'perfect match'. She didn't need anyone else. She had Carter. She had CatCo. And that was all she needed. She would not go looking for her Other. If they were worthy they'd put in the effort and find her. And no matter what happened she would not be disappointed. Whether someone found her, whether they didn't, whether they were worthy of her love or were meant to be a friend that supported her; only time would tell. She'd deliberately packed her schedule tomorrow so she wouldn't have to think about the what if's.

According to her ticking wrist clock, she had until tomorrow morning at ten fifteen to find out if her 'Other' was as determined as she secretly hoped they were.

Until then, she would be in her office. She had interviews for a new assistant that she couldn't miss after all.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

For two years Kara lives on cloud nine. She graduates college with a double bachelor's degree in journalism and art. She moves to National City to be closer to Alex. She practically floats through life for two years. The belief that she is going to meet her bondmate always in the back of her mind. As if it is proof alone that Krypton's destiny had been set long before she was ever born. Her destiny had never been to arrive with Kal-El. And now that she's beginning to accept that Fate was unfolding as it should, the depressive moments she falls into when thinking about home are fewer and farther between. She smiles, and laughs, and is kind. She excels where she can and she holds back where she must. She comes to love Earth and believe in forging her own destiny away from Kal-El, and her parents.

She takes chances, risks. She puts herself out there in small ways. She knows that she cannot be the hero that Kal-El is, and that she knows she can be. She hides in plain sight and she works hard at forging ahead.

She accepts challenges and surpasses them. She finds female heroines to look up to, to emulate. She sees Cat Grant's talk shows and reads her bylines and becomes a little obsessed with the media mogul. So when the chance comes for her to work for Cat Grant—her own personal inspiration, heroine, Kara takes it into her arms and holds on.

Kara Zor-El Danvers is stronger than any living person on this earth, she is kind and sweet, and fair. She is intelligent, wise, and dedicated. She will never give up. She will always strive to be better than she was before. She is hopeful and excited and ready for her story to begin.

Kara Zor-El Danvers is Cat Grant's 10:15.

And the clock is ticking.

 **The End**


End file.
